Acer passes Dell in global notebook shipments

Laptops continued to outgrow the rest of the PC market during 2007 with a massive 41% increase in shipments over the same period last year, according to the latest figures from DisplaySearch. And while HP managed to stay on top for the sixth straight quarter with 20.1% of the global laptop market, all major PC manufacturers are showing healthy growth rates.

Perhaps the biggest news to come out of the report was that Acer supposedly managed to displace Dell as the second largest vendor of laptops globally with 15.9% market share – though when factoring in desktops shipped Dell is still number two. Taking into account its recent purchases of Gateway and Packard Bell, DisplaySearch claims the PC vendor managed to outsell Dell by around 600,000 units and was just under 1.5 million units behind HP. Dell fell to third place globally after shipping 4.64 million notebooks for a 14% share, followed by Toshiba and Lenovo with 8.6% and 8.2% market share respectively.